Three Bunches of Bees

Today was an absolutely crazy day.  I had the day off for "Honey Do Day" and our goal was to clean out the garage, however it was interrupted by a call from Wetherall Place, an ICFDD facility in town, about a swarm that had moved into a hollow tree.  Since they wanted to save the tree but get rid of the bees, I used my vacuum to suck up the foragers as they came back from the field.  Since this was taking quite a while and I had other tasks to complete, I plugged the hole and decided to come back later to get what I could. 

I then received a call from Matt Figgins who spotted a swarm near Stew-Stras High School.  I took Jessie with me and we headed out to get that swarm!  It was on a diagonal fence support and was quite large.  I scraped them into a box and then installed them in a nuc at the farm.

Afterwards I returned to Wetherell Place and tried to smoke out as many bees as possible and returned home around 9:30pm to learn of an emergency call about a large swarm hanging in the front yard of Monte Stephens' house in rural Lillyville.  My wife had a few Girl Scouts still at the house for late night bake sale baking, and Hannah, a 3rd grader, wanted to come along.  So, Hannah, Aaron, and I headed out to Lillyville in the middle of the night to hunt up a swarm.  We found the Stephens home without any trouble, and what we found was a beautiful swarm about 2 feet long hanging from a tree in their front yard.  I vacuumed them up for installation at the farm the next day.  Hannah told her mom all about the adventure when we returned to the house at about 11:30pm.